Another Update (5/16/14 9:15am):  Well, the idiot apparently didn’t learn their lesson about stealing content earlier this week and they stole another post this morning which I have again complained about to GoDaddy.  I expect it will be removed soon like the others but this guy really needs to be shut down because he obviously has no respect for the content of others.

Update (5/13/14 9am):  The site that copied and pasted the posts from Global Geek News that inspired this blog post has had the posts removed (presumably by GoDaddy who continues to investigate the matter).  If anything else changes, I will update this post again.  The original post is below.

When I woke up this morning, I rolled over to fire up my laptop (yes, I sleep with my laptop in my bed) to do my routine checking of various social sites, e-mail, news readers, ect and found a number of automated e-mails from Global Geek News that caught my attention.

It seems that some site known as kinkementary.net copied and pasted 5 posts from Global Geek News related to geek dating and reposted them on their site even with parts of my site like the Pinterest button still attached.  Perhaps the dumbest part of it all was that while they took the text and even the Pinterest button from my site, they didn’t bother to get the images and videos there were the focus of the posts!

While I was only half awake until I saw those e-mails, seeing them woke me right up (who needs coffee to wake you up when the anger from stolen content can do the job?) and to say that I was irritated would be putting it mildly.

I didn’t have much time to deal with the situation as I had to get ready for work but I did manage to do a whois on the site before shutting my computer down.  Once I got settled in at work, I contacted the site’s domain registrar, GoDaddy and followed their procedures for having the copyright infringing content removed (and hopefully the site taken down because I also checked out the Google+ page attached to the site only to find a number of other people complaining about having their content stolen as well).  I now have to hope that it gets removed before the duplicate content hurts my already ailing search results (any cheap yet good SEO people out there that can help me get my old search traffic back?).

So, I wanted to publicly address how content on Global Geek News can be used/shared.

While you are welcome to use small snippets or quotes from stuff I post on here, I will not tolerate the copying and reposting of entire posts.  If you don’t even bother to ask me if it is ok to do that (the answer will still be no), I won’t even bother to send you a takedown notice and I will take my complaint straight to your host instead with the sole desire of having your site taken offline.

That said, I absolutely encourage people to blog about the stuff they find on Global Geek News.  All I ask is that you write your own content for the post rather than just stealing mine and give me some credit for being your source for whatever it is by linking back to my original post.

I also absolutely encourage you to share stuff you find on here with whatever social sites you use (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, ect) or e-mail or however you like to share stuff.  The main reason I post most of the content I do is to bring as much attention as possible to the creators of whatever it is I post about like geeky engagement ring boxes or giant nerdy ice sculptures or whatever.  So, the more people share the stuff I post, the more recognition those people get for the cool things that they do which is my main goal.

Anyway, when this little issue popped up this morning, I decided that instead of one of my normal fun posts like I try to do every Monday to make your Monday a little less awful, I would take a little bit of time to address this and make my thoughts on this stuff clear because once in a while I do get e-mails from readers asking about sharing or reposting stuff that I post on here which I have never really addressed publicly.

If you have any questions about this stuff, please feel free to leave them in the comments and I will respond.  Also, for other issues similar to this, I’d recommend checking out the legal page.  It isn’t a bunch of dry, boring legalese like most sites and you are sure to have a few laughs so even if you don’t really care about this stuff, I’d suggest giving it a read anyway.